PTR feels great, it's so much fun to level new characters with these skill changes. I really wish we had more than 10 character slots in the expansion.

Like others have already stated, the only thing that should be fixed and tuned down to improve the leveling process is the amount of smart drops we are getting from mobs. Almost every item you get now, including the legendaries, is a smart drop. I'm fine with quest reward items having a high chance to be a smart drop, though.

I was thinking about community submissions before I read your statement. I agree, let the community edit using a client-side editor and submit it to the community for voting. If Bliz likes it, then they can roll it into a weekly patch.

Communities are a gold mine, filled with talented people who would find a lot of joy in creating something cool in their free time. Give them some small recognition like allowing them to name their personal Rift, and they will do your job for you, free of charge. With focus taken away from theory crafting and building new characters for different builds, more actual content on regular basis would be a great thing to prolong the lifespan of D3.

Once Blizzard implements other system like the Trials etc., possibilities for community created content would become even greater. You don't have to let modders mess with the world that we play through in the story mode, nor the drops rates and items. Just give them tools to make some awesome dungeons, rifts and trials along with cosmetic rewards (transmorg items/spell effects) that are highly voted and don't break the lore or the feel of Diablo atmosphere. And pretty much everyone wins.

They prohibited it mostly because of the Auction House and the always online requirement. It can be argued that great games welcome and embrace modding, as it prolongs their lifespan substantially. Skyrim and the other Elder Scrolls titles are the best examples of how community vastly improved upon the original design. Restricting the option to mod most certainly hurts a game like D3, which would have already had a ton of content and improvements created by the community.

Now, the only way for D3 to become fully moddable, we would have to have the option to play offline, which is never going to happen. Still, with the AH and real money transactions out of the equation, a few modding options could be safely implemented. I would very much be interested to see what kind of events, zones and quests modders would come up with if given the right tools.

For example, if Blizzard Launcher ever evolves into something similar to Steam, you could improve upon the Rift system by allowing the people to create rifts with custom events, quests and layouts (but not different loot tables or drop chances than those already in the game) and those Rifts could then be rated by the community through the launcher and finally implemented into the game with the content patches based on the feedback from Blizzard employees and the players themselves. Just imagine what good modders could do with a 'Rift Maker', and ten levels of content at their disposal. We would suddenly have a lot of exciting Rift Keys to look forward to while farming, offering us more than 'kill a certain amount of monsters and defeat a plain boss' rifts that we have now. Cool event rifts like Sudden Death, Timed rifts or Ghost Rifts where you would be trying to outrun a ghost of a fallen hero to the end of the rift while trying to beat his monster kill count at the same time. These are just off the top of my head, and there are probably a lot more innovative ideas already out there.

Still, modding in D3 seems at most like a dream. Someday, perhaps, it can happen. If done right, it would only do this game good.

I don't believe anybody who says "i'm not buying RoS because it's too expensive". I just don't. We will all buy it just to see how good it is.

You'll pretty much know exactly how good the expansion will be before the launch. The beta offers everything the expansion has to offer, and in the next few months with the tweaks and official Blizzard statements we'll get a crystal clear picture of RoS as a game. This is a fair move by them, letting the players watch/play through all of the content in beta and decide for themselves is this expansion really worth their money.

Considering the amount of hours of gameplay a new class, act and adventure mode will offer, 40$ seems like a good deal. If you simply enjoy farming, maybe trying some fresh builds with the new legendaries, than RoS is definitely worth the money on launch. All these aspects of the game are polished and work great in the expansion, along with the streamlined leveling system.

Other than that, the game doesn't really offer much, and it seems that it will sadly once again get pretty boring after a couple of weeks (mostly for softcore players). So, if it does feel like 40$ is too expensive for you at the time of the launch, and you have better things to spend your money on, it's OK to wait a bit and see how everything will play out in the weeks after the game is released. Even when, or if, ladders and competitive PvE are released, the players who got the expansion on day one won't have any real advantage over a player who bought the game later on.

Better to wait than to get frustrated for spending money on something you won't really enjoy that much. This time, Blizzard made the right move to make all of the content public months before the release, and no one will be right to blame them or to ask refunds for the game like they did with the original D3. RoS will mostly sell copies on it's own virtues and quality of design, which is a good thing, while D3 earned a lot of millions solely on the legendary legacy of the Diablo franchise.

This is an awesome idea, but (assuming they're not already working on something like it), it would cost millions and delay release by months.

It would take some time but it would definitely not cost millions to make. It's only a tower and some trials, re-using models, animations and environments that are already present in the game. Even the cosmetic rewards can be something that currently exists in-game (like that El'Druin one in the picture). Balancing the difficulty would probably take much much longer than designing all of this.

I'll be playing HC on day one. SC just doesn't appeal to me any more. Without that sense of "if i die, i'm dead", the game just isn't enjoyable. I'm I the only one that feels that way about this game now?

There's a lot of us here who prefer hardcore, it makes the game infinitely more fun.

I'm already playing exclusively on HC, and I'll be starting a few more characters when loot 2.0 hits, but I don't think I will be buying the expansion on day one. Blizzard intends to ship the game with the same content that's available in the beta right now. Ladders, Trials and whatever they plan to add will most likely come later on, and to me the game will not be worth 40$ on launch. Messing around with the new class changes and itemization will be enough for me to hold me interested until they implement a meaningful and competitive end-game.

Even now RoS end-game is superior to vanilla in basically every way imaginable. Sure, the beta experience rates and drop rates make it seem like the game is gonna mirror the console version of D3, where it is much easier to gear out your character, but we can't possibly know that this will be the way the expansion will play out on release.
There is still like five months of testing and implementing before that, and plenty of time for Blizzard to add new systems and balance/augment the existing ones. I disagree with OP on every argument he made except for the Rifts, which are definitely pretty basic and bland in their current state.

There is no end game in vanilla D3, pretty much everyone's farming three zones in A1 for maximum efficiency to level paragon up to 100. That is all. Even in these early stages of beta, RoS offers a much better and more satisfying end game. Sure, in it's current state the expansion is not worth the 40$, but we are also like five months away from the launch, and a lot of things will get implemented, tweaked and changed in the meantime. Be patient. Good things are on their way.

Oh yeah...I forgot. Aside form the Act, the class, the mystic, we also have 10 additional character levels and with it new skills with their corresponding runes for the expansion.

I hope there's more than that though. The free patch (Loot 2.0, Paragon 2.0, Nephalem Trials, Loot runs) looks really great so the expansion needs to bring something more than that unless the expansion is really light and costs 25% of the vanilla like phatosen said, I mean D2:LoD had the runewords which broken as they are, changed D2 forever.

Blizzard will definitely announce more expansion content at Blizzcon. That's the place for which you save the juiciest info.
Josh stated that they picked only a few topics to talk about at Gamescom, and that there's a lot more to the expansion. Also, whoever thinks the game will cost less than 40$ is quite delusional. xD

Praise the gods, there seems to be a huge itemization system overhaul in the works. It is the one true problem of D3, and, in the eyes of the majority of the playerbase, it's biggest downfall. Lazy and bland, it was a step back in the evolution of the ARPG itemization, which should always have soul and complexity attached to it. Blizzard won't screw this one up. They have no choice but to make some big changes if they are to pave the way for the success of the upcoming expansion.

I can agree with your sarcastic remark, to some extent. But on the other hand, the last two important patches that vastly improved the gameplay experience, 1.0.5 and 1.0.8, came seven months apart. That is just too much time not to lose a whole lot of players, especially with the PvP fiasco that happened in the meantime. 1.0.7 did make crafting semi-relevant again, but MP levels and monster density are both on the whole other level of complexity and importance for the future of the game. Adding a few crafting plans and a new crafting material is really not that big of a change even though it certainly is a welcome one.

With that being said, D3 feels much better than it did a year ago, without a doubt. There is no reason not to look forward to the future and what it holds in store for this game.

Can't we fix those major issues with the current gems before we start lobbying for throwing more spaghetti at the wall? The current gems leave a LOT of room to be desired. That needs to be fixed before we start expanding on a system that just isn't living up to expectations.

I kind of considered that to be a given.
They would obviously have to rework the system/gems if they are ever to add new socketable affixes.

We've also discussed adding other types of "socketables" with a wide variety of possible affixes that you can put in your socketed items instead of gems.

This needs to happen.

Nope, this would not be a good thing at all. 3 sockets for chest and 1 socket for weapon are already mandatory. Introducing more sockets and more awesome gems will just make it more mandatory and just another "must have thing" on an item. If it's something like Ice Climbers or Tasker and Theos, were sockets are optional, it's fine, but any weapon/pants/chest without (max) socket is useless. We need more choice, and less *mandatory* additional stats.

Isn't that the whole point of the sentence that I've quoted earlier? Choice, and lots of it.
I'm sorry, but adding more affixes that can be socketed into an item could be a great change if it's done right, especially if it can lead to greater build diversity and more interesting styles of play. You are just blatantly saying it's bad without even considering those affixes could ever compete with the 4 measly ones we have at this moment. Yeah, critical hit damage is a mandatory gem for weapons, but they never claimed that this would be the case for the rest of the game's life. Things will probably change drastically when the expansion hits.

I don't care if I'll regret saying that later on, but dammit this man's posts did more good to the game and the overall optimism of the community than anything else I've seen from Blizzard in the past six months.